Cancer Patients “the Other Victims of Yemen’s War”

YemenExtra

SH.A.

Cancer patients in Yemen are struggling to access treatment as the health care system faces funding and medicine shortages in a three-year-old war that has racked the impoverished Arab state.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says there are around 35,000 people suffering from cancer in Yemen and that some 11,000 cases are diagnosed each year.

The National Oncology Center in Sana’a admits around 600 new cancer patients each month. But it received only $1 million in funding last year from state entities and international aid groups, the head of the center, Ahmed al-Ashwal, told Reuters.

The few beds available at the center are reserved for children. Other patients receive treatment intravenously, while sitting on dilapidated recliner chairs or in the waiting area.

It is difficult to find medicine, and if you can, patients cannot afford it, said Mohammed Al-Emad, a relative of a cancer patient.

Yemen is embroiled in a war between a Saudi-led military coalition and the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which has crippled its economy and healthcare system, and unleashed the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis with millions facing starvation and diseases such as cholera, diphtheria and malaria.

(Source: Reuters)